Prime Ministers and Some Others | Page 7

dreamed of doing. He had rebuilt the
British Constitution on a democratic foundation.
At this point some account of Lord Derby's personal appearance may
be introduced. My impression is that he was only of the middle height,
but quite free from the disfigurement of obesity; light in frame, and
brisk in movement. Whereas most statesmen were bald, he had an
immense crop of curly, and rather untidy, hair and the abundant
whiskers of the period. His features were exactly of the type which

novelists used to call aristocratic: an aquiline nose, a wide but firmly
compressed mouth, and a prominent chin. His dress was, even then,
old-fashioned, and his enormous black satin cravat, arranged in I know
not how many folds, seemed to be a survival from the days of Count
D'Orsay. His air and bearing were such as one expects in a man whose
position needs no advertizing; and I have been told that, even in the
breeziest moments of unguarded merriment, his chaff was always the
chaff of a gentleman.
Lord Beaconsfield, writing to a friend, once said that he had just
emerged from an attack of the gout, "of renovating ferocity," and this
phrase might have been applied to the long succession of gouty
illnesses which were always harassing Lord Derby. Unfortunately, as
we advance in life, the "renovating" effects of gout become less
conspicuous than its "ferocity;" and Lord Derby, who was born in 1799,
was older than his years in 1867. In January and February, 1868, his
gout was so severe that it threatened his life. He recovered, but he saw
that his health was no longer equal to the strain of office, and on the
24th of February he placed his resignation in the Queen's hands.
But during the year and a half that remained to him he was by no
means idle. He had originally broken away from the Whigs on a point
which threatened the temporalities of the still-established Church of
Ireland; and in the summer of 1868 Gladstone's avowal of the principle
of Irish Disestablishment roused all his ire, and seemed to quicken him
into fresh life. The General Election was fixed for November, and the
Liberal party, almost without exception, prepared to follow Gladstone
in his Irish policy. On the 29th of October Bishop Wilberforce noted
that Derby was "very keen," and had asked: "What will the Whigs not
swallow? Disraeli is very sanguine still about the elections."
The question about the Whigs came comically from the man who had
just made the Tories swallow Household Suffrage; and Disraeli's
sanguineness was ill-founded. The election resulted in a majority of
one hundred for Irish Disestablishment; Disraeli resigned, and
Gladstone became for the first time Prime Minister.
The Session of 1869 was devoted to the Irish Bill, and Lord Derby,

though on the brink of the grave, opposed the Bill in what some people
thought the greatest of his speeches in the House of Lords. He was pale,
his voice was feeble, he looked, as he was, a broken man; but he rose to
the very height of an eloquence which had already become traditional.
His quotation of Meg Merrilies' address to the Laird of Ellangowan,
and his application of it to the plight of the Irish Church, were as apt
and as moving as anything in English oratory. The speech concluded
thus:
"My Lords, I am now an old man, and, like many of your Lordships, I
have already passed three score years and ten. My official life is
entirely closed; my political life is nearly so; and, in the course of
nature, my natural life cannot now be long. That natural life
commenced with the bloody suppression of a formidable rebellion in
Ireland, which immediately preceded the union between the two
countries. And may God grant that its close may not witness a renewal
of the one and a dissolution of the other."
This speech was delivered on the 17th of June, 1869, and the speaker
died on the 23rd of the following October.

IV
BENJAMIN DISRAEI I always count it among the happy accidents of
my life that I happened to be in London during the summer of 1867. I
was going to Harrow in the following September, and for the next five
years my chance of hearing Parliamentary debates was small. In the
summer of 1866, when the Russell-Gladstone Reform Bill was thrown
out, I was in the country, and therefore I had missed the excitement
caused by the demolition of the Hyde Park railings, the tears of the
terrified Home Secretary, and the litanies chanted by the Reform
League under Gladstone's window in Carlton House Terrace. But in
1867 I was in the thick of the fun. My father was the Sergeant-at-Arms
attending the House of Commons, and